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Wisconsin People & Ideas – Spring 2017

In this issue: New Birkie Museum opens, Barstow & Grand lit mag launches, the Domes achieve landmark status, and aquaponics innovator Nelson & Pade puts Monticello on the map. World class chocolate made in Spooner is on the Wisconsin Table, and we report on mosquitos and mosquito-borne disease research in Wisconsin. Fairytales and folklore fuel the art of sculptor Gerit Grimm and painter Gina Litherland, whose work is showing at the James Watrous Gallery. Essays on finding a creative community and James Zwerg, Wisconsin's Freedom Rider, complement new fiction and poetry by Wisconsin writers as well as reviews of new and interesting titles.

Rebecca Nelson always had a passion for raising fish; by the time she was ten, her family’s home was filled with aquariums. Her partner, John Pade, grew up on a dairy farm, learning a lot about livestock and agriculture.

Taking its name from a storied intersection in downtown Eau Claire, a new literary magazine called Barstow & Grand promises to be the perfect complement to the city’s burgeoning arts and culture scene.

My measure of a poem’s quality is often found in the question, “How did the poet think of that?” If that poem should happen to begin an entire collection that has me asking that same question again and again, well, then I know I have something...

Thomas J. Erickson’s first full-length poetry collection, The Biology of Consciousness, stopped me dead in my tracks, even before I cracked the cover. What on earth could the book or its title poem mean?

Novelist Nickolas Butler isn’t afraid to tackle big ideas in his writing. His sophomore effort, set in and around the fictional Camp Chippewa in Northern Wisconsin, seeks to understand the weighty subject of its title: The Hearts of Men.

Wisconsin People & Ideas is the Academy's quarterly magazine of contemporary Wisconsin thought and culture.